Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop

You might know Haven Kimmel best for her memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch, but she’s also the author of several works of fiction including her latest, Iodine. Here she explores the psychological effects of trauma through the eyes of college student Trace Pennington. After surviving ... (more)a terrible childhood, Trace managed to become a successful student and assume a new identity as a girl without a past. When she falls in love, she is forced to confront her past anew, but her recovered memories do as much to obscure her story as reveal it.

If only your philosophy course in school was as hilarious as Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein’s Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. It’s a not-so-reverent crash course through the great philosophical thinkers and traditions, from Existentialism (What do Hegel and Bette Midler have in common?) to ... (more)Logic (Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything). If you like to take the heavy stuff lightly, you’ll enjoy an evening of philosophy 101 with Cathcart and Klein.

Wisconsin author Isabel Sharpe tells the story of Ann Reading, successful corporate executive, who finds herself completely out of place at a women’s retreat designed to help heartbroken women overcome failed relationships and begin life anew. Ann wants nothing to do with sitting around the campfire ... (more)singing “I Am Woman,” but when she befriends two fellow inmates she begins to see that the camp may have its benefits after all. The three strangers are about to bond on an adventure they didn’t ask for and discover that lives they thought were as good as it got suddenly get a lot better.

Acedia is an ancient word meaning “soul weariness,” a feeling author Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk; Amazing Grace) had experienced at different times in her life since she was a teenager. In Acedia & Me she explores the concept not only as it relates to her own life—in her marriage and the ... (more)challenges of grave illness; in her interest in the monastic tradition—but also as it relates to society as a whole, which Norris contends seems to be suffering from “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia and enervating despair.”

Seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson's life is forever changed when he finds his father dead, apparently by his own hand. But there are too many unanswered questions, not the least of which is, would his father actually kill himself? With simple elegance Lin Enger tells a story of betrayal, revenge and the ... (more)possibilities of forgiveness in this riveting portrait of a young man trying to hold his family together in a world tipped suddenly upside-down.

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss gets you in the Olympic spirit with the blockbuster story of the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. Learn more about legendary athletes, politics at the games where Cold War propaganda and spies, drugs and sex, money and television, civil rights and the rise of women superstars ... (more)all converged to forever change the essence of the Olympics.

The author of the Schwartz bookseller favorite In the Woods is back with a follow-up, The Likeness. Detective Cassie Maddox has quit the murder squad, too shaken up to continue her work. But when a young woman, (who happens to look a lot like Cassie and who was carrying an I.D. with Cassie's old undercover ... (more)name), is found dead, she can't resist the perfect opportunity to go back undercover to draw out the killer.

We may think we know the story of 9/11, but Lynn Spencer's moving account of the response by pilots, controllers and military commanders who found themselves on the front lines shows there is much more to the story. Spencer, an airline pilot, offers a riveting account of 9/11 that takes you behind the ... (more)scenes and shows you the defense launched that day like you've never seen it before.

Set in the conformist 1950s in Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, Ellen Baker's novel is the story of a newlywed who falls in love with a grand abandoned house, and begins to unravel dark secrets woven through the generations of a family. Baker explores the courage it takes to shape a life and the difficulty of ... (more)ever knowing the truth about another persons' desires. Paperback,